The Iconic Phantom Black/Hispanic Perpetrator; Fines to Fit the Crimes

By
Chuck Shepherd

In February, victims of crimes in San Antonio, Texas, and Terrebonne Parish, La., complained to police that they had been assaulted by, respectively, a "Hispanic male" and an "unknown black man" -- whom the victims admitted later did not exist.

San Antonio police learned that their victim had been accidentally, embarrassingly, shot by a friend mishandling his gun.

Louisiana authorities found that their victim had not been abducted and raped (and had her baby stolen).

Rather, she had wanted to hide her miscarriage from family and friends and invented a phantom attack as more acceptable. [KENS-TV (San Antonio), 2-6-2013] [WWL-TV (New Orleans), 2-28-2013]

In March, Microsoft was fined 561 million euros (about $725 million) by the European Commission after, apparently, a programmer carelessly left out just one line of code in Microsoft's Service Pack 1 of European versions of Windows 7.

That one line would have triggered the system to offer web browsers other than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, which Microsoft had agreed to include to settle charges that it was monopolizing the web-browser business.

(Also in March, the government of Denmark said that Microsoft owed it about a billion dollars in unpaid taxes when it took over a Danish company and tried to route its taxes through notorious tax havens such as Bermuda.

According to a March Reuters report, Denmark is among the first European countries to challenge such U.S.-standard tax shenanigans and is expecting payment in full.) [The Guardian (London), 3-6-2013] [Reuters, 3-4-2013]